How an 18th-Century Scientific Expedition Led to Latin American Independence

Over the next decade, Latin American nations will be celebrating their bicentennials, holding ceremonies and festivals to commemorate their independence from the Spanish Crown. From 1809 to 1821, nations from Mexico to Venezuela and from Peru to Chile fought against Spanish forces, one by one throwing off the colonial yoke and declaring themselves sovereign states. Simon Bolivar is well known as one of the most important leaders of this movement, but what is less well known is that Bolivar – as well as many of his predecessors and contemporaries – was inspired to envision Latin America as an independent realm by an 18th-century scientific expedition to measure the earth.

The Geodesic Mission to the Equator (1735-1744) was a joint scientific venture between France and Spain to establish the exact size and shape of the Earth. Such knowledge was needed to control and maintain their global empires, for the nation that could accurately determine the planet’s shape could securely navigate its oceans. A team of scientists and naval officers traveled to Quito, where they spent ten grueling years along the Andes Mountains to establish the length of a degree of latitude at the Equator. Although they suffered from cold, disease, attacks by angry mobs and local political struggles, they successfully determined the true measure of the Earth.

However, it was the written accounts they brought back that opened the eyes of Europe to the vast ecological richness of Latin America, and led to the great voyages of Alexandre von Humboldt and Charles Darwin. Moreover, it instilled in the minds of enlightened leaders the concept of Latin America as a unique place, separate from its mother country of Spain and not simply the source of its wealth. When Bolivar and his compatriots sought to overthrow colonial rule, they specifically referred to the Geodesic Mission to the Equator as inspiration for their movement. Indeed, when the new nation of Ecuador was created in 1830, it chose its name – meaning “Equator” – in homage to the great scientific expedition that helped inspire a whole continent to achieve independence.

About the author: Larrie D. Ferreiro is author and editor of award-winning books on the history of engineering, science and technology. He is a frequent contributor to the History Channel, Discovery Channel and the BBC. He lives in Fairfax, VA.

Giveaway is closed.

Would you like an email notification of other drawings? Sign up for our weekly digest in the sidebar.

The
greatest tragedy about the formative 15th century of Latin American was not, as
the former ‘colony masters’ would have it, the accurate measurement of its extension,
so to better exploit it and control it, or the systematic wiping of the
pre-Columbian native peoples inhabiting the continent. That, however tragic, is
a process still in course throughout the planet, despite all progress and
evolution of mankind ideas of independence and self-determination.

The
greatest cism was between Spain and Portugal, the two superpowers of the time, that effectively dictated how it’d grow and which language it’d speak four
centuries after.

That
Portugal, ever so briefly, was arguably the pioneer of the transoceanic wars of
conquest, and that Spain soon after formed the greatest naval army ever were
but details in the footnote of another emerging empire that soon overcame
them both: England.

With
very little economic interest in South America at the time, the tiny island of
the north nonetheless came to dominate the routes of trade north of the equator
and assure its power through the conquest of pretty much every land its pirates
and royal navy set foot on.

Back in
the south, though, and under the ominous hand of the Vatican, Spain and
Portuguese waged a bloody war for dominance of its borders and control over its
riches. Spain ultimately won, having vanquished the majority of the continent’s proto-countries, with the exception of its biggest.

The
Tordesillas accord finally settled the issue, the agreement being only the last of a series of attempts at establishing dual-dominance over the continent. The
irony, though, can’t be overlooked: Despite Spanish being, along with English, still one of the two most spoken languages of the Western world, and Portuguese being
reduced to a mere ‘specialty’ idiom, spoken by little over 300 million people
worldwide, is Brazil, as the biggest nation to speak the language, not
Argentina or any of the former Spanish colonies, the nation sporting the
‘most-likely-to-succeed’ sobriquet.

Whether
this will ever come to fruition is a matter of contentious debate, tilted heavily
politically, and perhaps biased for attributing excessive weight to the
current economic failures of the world’s biggest powers, the U.S., and the euro
zone nations.

It was,
though, Tordesillas, said to have been decided by the gash of a sword on a map
laid down on the floor, that forever determined that Brazil, for
its geographical position, would be the one to benefit most from slave
labor brought on from Africa (perhaps not coincidentally, Brazil was the last
western nation to renounce slavery) and the black race infusion on its
ethnicity and cultural expression.

As for
the so-called indians, who for a while had been nurtured by the Catholic Church
to learn Mozart and the fear of the white god of the nations invading their lands, their demise has been long and painful ever since. In Brazil,
their heritage is hardly traceable in the population DNA.

There’s
even an account, probably fictional, that once Tordesillas was finally signed,
all Missions, the seven city-states built at the cone of South American, were
immediately dismantled and the indians, armed with arc and arrows, were “summarily
shot out of the trees.”
The priests and bishops who, for half a century
had served as their protectors and taught them the economic ways of the west,
by helping them trade goods on the London exchange, and to be fearful of the Italian
pope, were by then, of course, nowhere to be seen. Wesley Coll